Looking for an aviation accident report and/or obituary

Factual Questions
1

I’m trying to find details of an airplane crash, and/or the pilot’s obituary.

Date: 1982, I think. Probably in the summer.
Make: Beechcraft
Model: Bonanza
Location: Tehachapi, CA or the Tehachapi Mountains
Fatalities: 3 (I think)
Pilot name: John Heczko, MD

The only obituary I can find is in JAMA, August 27 1982, but I don’t have access to the article. An NTSB query did not turn up any Bonanza crashes in California in 1982. (I might not be using it right.) No hits on the name in The Antelope Valley Press.

Does anyone have mighty search skills?

2

I found twelve fatal accidents in California involving a Beechcraft in 1982. The NTSB does not allow you to link to their search results page, but here are the terms I used at their search form (unspecified fields left at default values):

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/index.aspx

Event Start Date: 01/01/1982
Event End Date: 01/01/1983
State: California
Injury Severity: Fatal

Make: Beech

There were many different alphanumeric designations for Bonanzas, so don’t try to put anything in the Model field.

3

Apparently the query page doesn’t accept ‘Beechcraft’. I changed parameters and searched again, and then again for all makes.

I could not find the crash. I know it happened in the early-'80s. The JAMA issue that shows the person’s name is 1982. I know it happened in the Tehachapi area. I believe the aircraft was a Bonanza. But nothing I saw on the query results matches.

4

Google News. 1981.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZDdLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QiMNAAAAIBAJ&pg=6781,699168&dq=john+heczko&hl=en

Piper Cherokee.

5

Thanks, samclem.

6

I’ve had the following aviation links in IE for years now:
[ul]
[li]http://www.airsafe.com/index.html[/li][li]http://aviation-safety.net/index.php[/li][li]http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/reports_aviation.html[/li][li]http://www.planecrashinfo.com/index.html[/li][/ul]

7

I heard a story of another fatal crash at Tehachapi circa 1969 or so. So that’s certainly not the one you are looking for. But the alleged circumstances may be worth retelling.

For those unfamiliar with this, Tehachapi refers to a glider-port near the town of Tehachapi, in the mountains east of Bakersfield, CA. Once upon a time, the tow pilots were in the habit of diving very steeply after a glider released, to get back down and land as fast as possible. (That much I know, because I visited and watched them doing it.) This was supposedly to save fuel. Once, a pilot didn’t pull out of the dive promptly enough (for whatever reason) and ended up landing 6 feet BGL (that’s the opposite of AGL, if you get the drift). So the remaining tow pilots were required to quit THAT particular stunt.

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As an aside: For all you railroad buffs out there: This is the same Tehachapi that is the site of the world-famous Tehachapi Loop, where the train does a full 360-degree circle, through a tunnel below itself. It’s a few miles west of the town.
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